Catch

We just came inside from catching a lunar eclipse.  We watched the moon fading behind the earth fading behind the thick clouds, with a crowd of other people watching at one of the entrances of Riverside Park.  There are always other people, always other people.

I think in my life in Japan I became accustomed to being alone.  Being in Japan was a practice in loneliness.  I was far away from family and friends, far away from familiarity, and even in the cluster of people in which I moved, there was a loneliness.  The courtesy of the Japanese culture, the way that they express fear and love, to my eyes and ears and all that comes in between from their searching, was so quiet, so polite, or judging, or fill-in-the blank.  It was lonely.

There were many people in Japan, but there are so many people in New York.  And it is much harder to feel lonely.  I say this with winter ahead of me, but never in Japan would a woman have gotten on a bus and berated the bus driver for leaving the stop too early, continued to argue with him, and quickened to an apology to get him back on and driving again.  People throw themselves at one another in New York and are just as quick to ignore one another.  People say hello, or bury themselves in their work, but the strings of longing and loneliness seem shorter or non-existent.  There is so much here.  There are so many different people doing different things and the ragged edges of possibilities are as inviting as velcro.  It's hard not to become attached, to get caught up in the importance of walking from the subway stop.

It's been a week of many new things.  And new things require a lot of attention.  I began teaching at the Harlem Success Academy and find myself just as caught between worlds of education philosophy as I was a week ago.  I already have a growing affection for my students, something that I believe was seeded in the moments between discipline when I saw their deviations from the norm, their individual humanity that disrupted my classroom.  And somehow this is what has made me more committed to them, to finding a way to keep our order as tight as I know they are capable of doing.  A great deal can be done in this teaching style.  But I would like to include the words "Please" and "Thank you."  I would like to quell the discipline arms race that stands in the hallways in stern tones of reckoning.  What happens when these students grow up and people don't speak to them in such a tone?  Will they still know how to show respect?  I see what focus these students can achieve and I admire what learning can be done in its wake.  I find myself still at odds, not entirely committed to this tone because it is not mine, but I'm open to hearing what it can offer in the void of having my own.

And to balance this is the Suzuki training that I'm doing which is a guiding force in the expectations to which I wish to hold my group of students, though we have far fewer of the benefits of classic Suzuki teaching:  the involvement of the parent, the control of the teaching space, the expectation of daily guided practice, proper chairs and equipment.   But the tone is one of warm love.  It is still full of expectation, but it is also full of time.  There is time because there is support from all around, because there is trust that success will happen.  Time is timed my Harlem school.  There is no time for time.  But maybe that is the way it needs to be.  And it certainly it is efficient and a great way to motivate.  I suppose even Suzuki lessons use the motivation of the timer occasionally.

It's a wonderful opportunity to be merging and playing with these ideas in teaching.  And to add to this is Dalcroze which is a movement based method of music education in which I'm taking classes once a week.  There will be even more resources for thinking about how to embrace students, how to help them grow, how to reflect on what it is that needs to be shared and how to most effectively share it.

It is quite stimulating to be here.  And maybe this is the antidote to loneliness.  Or at least it is mine.   I'm finding myself more and more wrapped in this city, coming to love all the different people, all the different possibilities and feeling free to interject my own existence into it.  There are many things in New York, but I find loneliness to be a difficult one to feel at this point.  Of course I know that winter is ahead.  And I know that people rarely follow up on the get-togethers they say they will have.  One day I will feel lonely again, and wonder how to shake it, and wonder how to make the world seem so new as it does now.  And hopefully then, there will be the twins dressed in black that I saw on the train the other day, or the crowd speaking loudly in Spanish, or the shoe sellers yelling in Arabic on the street, or the vendor yelling "good morning" with his stern but kind eyes.  Hopefully there will be some New Yorker throwing themselves my way, allowing me to catch them.